We study insolvency cascades in an interbank system when banks are allowed to insure their loans with credit default swaps (CDS) sold by other banks. We show that, by properly shifting financial exposures from one institution to another, a CDS market can be designed to rewire the network of...

We model the production of complex goods in a large supply network. Each firmsources several essential inputs through relationships with other firms. Due to the risk of suchsupply relationships being idiosyncratically disrupted, firms multisource inputs and strategicallyinvest to make...

Empirical studies of commercial relationships between firms reveal that (i) suppliers encounter situations in which they can gain in the short run by acting opportunistically---for example, delivering a lower quality than promised after being paid; and (ii) good conduct is sustained not...

We study the incentives that agents have to invest in costly protection against cascading failures in networked systems. Applications include vaccination, computer security and airport security. Agents are connected through a network and can fail either intrinsically or as a result of the...

In Section 1 of this online appendix, we briefly suggest how our model can also accommodate the case when affirmative action takes the form of a biased promotion process. In Section 2, we present a generalized model in which we allow for strategic behavior by workers (Section 2.1), for...

Successive welfare-maximizing governments must decide whether to implement an affirmative action policy. This affirmative action policy is purported to improve the performance distribution of a targeted group (minority or otherwise), although this improvement becomes trivial when the policy is...